Whenever Sean and I visit my parents’ house, we spend most of our time in the kitchen. Entire days are planned around cooking and eating. It’s not unusual for us to go to the grocery store seven times in a week. And even when meals are over and the dishes are washed, you can usually still find the family congregating around the bar or gossiping next to the snack counter.
Even though the past couple of months have been filled with Portuguese castles, German beer gardens, and Greek islands, I still sometimes miss that familiar, homey feeling. So it’s a good thing we went to Austria.
My brother arranged for the three of us to stay with a family he knows in the Wachau Valley—Austria’s wine region—in early October. And for four glorious days, it was like we were home again. We ate delicious traditional food prepared by our Austrian mom, and each meal was served with a heaping helping of cultural conversation—usually facilitated by our philosophizing Austrian dad. It was the perfect menu for recharging our homebody batteries on the road.
Behold, the dishes we tried and the random, hilarious, unforgettable topics that went along with them:
Knödel
Knödeln are fluffy, tennis ball-sized dumplings that can be topped with a variety of sauces. Our Austrian mom prepared a huge batch, and served them with an eggplant sauce and a turkey sauce.
Best enjoyed: While discussing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Austrians felt fine-to-neutral about their native son—until he didn’t intervene to spare a man from the death penalty when he was the governor of California. That caused a minor scandal in Austria, where people are generally against state-sponsored execution (which is understandable, given the country’s history).
Sturm
Without meaning to, we planned our visit around the most wonderful time of the year in the Wachau—sturm season. Sturm is a very young, still-fermenting wine that’s served to celebrate the beginning of the harvest season. It’s like drinking fruit juice with a little kick. (But only a small one—the alcohol content is so low that people say “mahlzeit” or “mealtime” as a toast instead of the traditional “prost.”)
Best enjoyed: In the home of one of Sean’s former coworkers. The company Sean used to work for is enormous, so Sean and this man had no idea the other one existed until we showed up at his house in small-town Austria for a party—and ended up drinking a lot of his sturm.
Presskopf
During the aforementioned sturm party, the topic turned to Austrians’ fondness for pig’s ear. While there was none to be found at the local grocery store, that didn’t stop our Austrian mom. To satisfy our curiosity, she whipped up a bowl of presskopf the next day. In English, it’s literally “pressed head,” or head cheese, an amalgam of oinky bits (like tongue, feet, and heart) suspended in a gelatinous log. We ate ours sauer, mixed with vinegar, pumpkin oil, and onions.
Presskopf
Best enjoyed: While discussing American sitcoms. Our Austrian family had seen a lot of the great ones, but never Seinfeld. Luckily, Sean and I brought our Roku stick along, and we wasted no time showing them what they’d been missing.
Spätzle
I’m a total sucker for spätzle—a type of Central European noodle—especially the way our Austrian mom made it. She served up two varieties: one in a cream sauce topped with ham, and the other mixed with eggs. I may have helped myself to two-to-five bowls of both.
Best enjoyed: Before visiting a brewery. Austria’s craft beer scene is still relatively new, but that hasn’t stopped brewers from innovating. The brewery we visited offered a hemp beer (“without the fun”), which inspired a laugh-out-loud conversation about our countries’ marijuana laws.
Apfelstrudel
Apple strudel may be Austria’s best-known dessert. Our Austrian mom had just pulled two out of the oven when we arrived, and we indulged for breakfast, lunch, and dinner dessert throughout our stay.
Best enjoyed: With a waltz playing in the background. Our Austrian mom is a cracker-jack accordionist, and she treated us to traditional tunes one evening over coffee and cake.
Heuriger
We didn’t eat out much during our stay, but it’d be an abomination to visit the Napa Valley of Austria without patronizing a heuriger—cozy taverns where winemakers serve their newest wine and simple food.
We sipped glasses of Grüner Vetliner while chowing down on assorted cheeses and dips, as well as slices of beef in a balsamic cream sauce, and roasted pork with mustard. It was, without question, the tastiest restaurant meal we’d had to that point.
Best enjoyed: With a generous side of gemütlichkeit. Austrians are great practitioners of it too, and the perfect way to experience it is at a dimly-lit heuriger surrounded by friends.
As we were saying our goodbyes, my brother, Sean, and I insisted that our Austrian family come hang out in our parents’ kitchen in Texas sometime. We’ll fix ‘em some tacos, brisket, and pecan pie and talk about Matthew McConaughey and football. Alright? Alright, alright!
What’s the first thing you think of when I say Colombia? Cocaine? Pablo Escobar? Narcos? FARC? Terrorism? That’s fair. But what if I told you everything you thought you knew about the country is wrong?